Kartrocket

Kartrocket is a Delhi, India based Software As A Service (SaaS) eCommerce platform which let’s people start their own store for a monthly / Quarterly / Yearly fee.
Kartrocket has also integrated shipping partner shiprocket that provides an interface to track shipments. Kartrocket’s customers are having mixed feeling about their platform.
When asked, here are some of the points that they gave out.

Pro’s:
Kartrocket has some advantages that benefit a certain small-sized business group:
1. They provide a Mobile app for Sellers to manage the store, create products so it becomes easy to sell from anywhere.
2. They own and operate Shiprocket, because of Shiprocket’s integration in Kartrocket, they provide a one click shipping dashboard which tracks shipments from a few shipping partners they tie up with constantly for their service.
3. Kartrocket’s storefront can help list your store products on sites on Shopclues & Junglee. Thereby increasing your chances of multiplying your sales through other networks.
4. Ability to Sell Internationally (Available on platinum and enterprise),
5.You an manage your affiliates on the Dashboard of Kart Rocket, this helps in increasing your influencer base so people can write about your product and get paid out for the same.
6. Basic sales automation features are available. An effective Recommendations engines etc are known to increase sales, like the ones you see on Amazon. Kartrocket claims to have them in place.

Con’s:
Poor Customer Experience:
The common complaint that everyone puts forward is that the complaints are not tended to promptly or sometimes ignored.
Hosted platform that has a recurring fee that can add up as you grow. Though it may sound less, As you grow, this may become a significant burden.
International selling / shipping is only available to Platinum and upwards. If you have very less products and need international selling you’ll still have to buy platinum plan without the use for it except the international selling feature.
Payment processor like Paypal isn’t available by default to all plans. Which may hinder selling digital products on the base plan.
Templates that are currently available are slightly older. They do not, reflect the changing trends in design. Some of the themes as the customers say, aren’t really responsive.
Integration with Marketing automation related apps or service isn’t available, like hootsuite.
Though the store provides automatic uploading of products in Shopclues and Junglee, you can only manually upload in Amazon and eBay.
While, the features mentioned are available, a lot of customers say that their experience has been buggy or glitch filled. A stable solution is yet to be available.

Prime Fusion

Prime Fusion is again an Open Source Node JS based eCommerce platform. It is built on MEAN Stack. The folks behind Prime Fusion chose to go with pure MEAN stack as they wanted to replace the traditional Php Based eCommerce solutions like Magento, WooCommerce etc. Unlike Reaction Commerce, Prime Fusion is focused mainly on end customers than developers. Called ” Worlds first Business ready eCommerce platform”, Prime Fusion seems to analyze all the real-time issues eCommerce owners face & the entire solution is built around this concept.Lets take a look at the Pro’s & Con’s for this platform.

Pro’s:

Based purely on MEAN Stack & does on depend on any other architectures. This makes it easy for any MEAN stack developer to take it up and start playing around with it instantly.
Open Source and Free.
Business focused. The platform gives more focus on essential features & road map that is a real pain for eCommerce site owners.
Fast & Light weight.
Comes with Android & iOS apps.
Has many Apps integrated already. Comes with some sleek templates.

Con’s:

Relatively new in the market. So there is not much of community effect still.
Not much Plugins & Themes as present for Magento & Woocommerce.

StoreHippo

StoreHippo, is an eCommerce platform which says it has an integrated 360 eCommerce solution, meaning they have a web and mobile first eCommerce solution. StoreHippo is powered by NodeJs MEAN stack. With StoreHippo you can start a single vendor or Multi-Vendor marketplace. StoreHippo claims itself to be scalable.

Pro’s:
1. StoreHippo uses, AWS and AKAMAI as it’s backbone to deliver assets over the web. Thereby operating on an established reliable cloud infrastructure.
2. Availability of Logistics and Payment gateway integration through API
Email + SMS gateways for transactional purposes, available on higher end plans.
3. Selling through social mediums is available on the platform.
Features like discount coupons, digital product delivery, International shipping through Shipping Partners are available.
4. Integration with third-party marketing applications is possible.
Allows you to customize the stores.
5. In-store Analytics for each store is available to see where the engagement is happening and where they can put up advertisements.
6. Multi-Seller platform for starting a marketplace place with vendors is available on top tier.
Storehippo has a Mobile ready platform with apps for iOS and Android

Con’s:

Expensive plans: For the amount of products that StoreHippo allows pricing is a little expensive. Also, the basic shop is a very normal offering that can be found on even an open source cart system.

StoreHippo is a hosted SaaS platform that doesn’t let you control over your data, there is always the danger of a security breach on other store, since these stores are hosted on a single cloud / server, your business may also be susceptible to suffer the damage. Also, If someday you are in a position to Change a provider because you’ve grown out of the StoreHippo’s serving capacity, It won’t be easy to migrate to another provider without a proper data export facility.

Poor Customer service, that’s something StoreHippo customers have complained consistently. Response time and resolution time can vary from days to weeks. We spoke to some customers who have had bad experiences
Limited product inventory for base plans, unlimited products are only available at the Top tier. Pushing people to buy plans that they don’t really need is not really advisable. You won’t be able to use international shipping if you don’t have a higher plan.

Essential features which are available by default on other service providers is only available at the top tier. This pushes users to purchase only the top tier plan as part of their strategy.

Only some Features set are available by default, if you want a specific functionality that will add a different dimension to your business or vertical, you won’t be able to do so, because of StoreHippo’s hosted platform. Extending a functionality will only be possible on a self-hosted Open source software or custom flexible proprietary software, where they make the changes to your store as a white label solution. StoreHippo doesn’t allow that as they would have to make the change across their platform, which is tedious.

Automatic upload of products to third party marketplaces like Amazon, Google Shopping, Snapdeal etc are not available, this sort of curbs the sales to a great extent, If the feature were to be present, it would amplify your products reach across different marketplaces.

Hope you got a clear idea on which eCommerce platform to go with via this comparison of Kartrocket vs Storehippo vs Prime Fusion